Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside

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Rural is hybrid biography and exploration of Britain's most lucrative rural working-class industries over the centuries through to present day, how exactly these fit into the British cultural landscape and the type of people who underpin them. As someone who grew up in a small town in Northumberland and who remains there to this day - albeit after a detour through a variety of more heavily populated areas such as Newcastle - this book sounded appealing to me, and as other country bumpkins will know, living your formative years in a rural location makes it difficult to ever live, or more importantly be happy, in a city. Interspersing her own family history between chapters dedicated to Land; Wood; Coal; Water; Food; Slate; Textiles; Tourism; Development; Business; and Our Land, Smith explores each industry from its inception and early days and its evolution through to today. Coming from the heart, and with a heart’s knowledge, it is a gentle but thoughtful inquiry emanating from the sensitivity, exposure and vulnerability of a way of life and community not used to speaking out. One that exists in deference to a landowning power and class, and the knowledge that you mustn’t bite the hand that feeds and shelters you. It comes from a place where community is everything. With enormous top of the range TVs and multiple streaming services they won’t even need to go to the cinema.

A wonderful book, beautifully conceived … So immediate and clearly seen, so gracefully and gently written … It is such a valuable thing’Adam Nicolson, author of Life Between the Tides - The point is that we have (collectively) chosen to kill the former economic structure. People have no idea what a working rural economy would look because the countryside is just a vehicle for expressing other obsessions of rural idylls or environmental havens or whatever.The politics of land ownership and rural economics are complex and Smith deserves credit for grappling with some of this territory within an accessible and thought-provoking narrative. There's much to enjoy in Rural" Living in rural areas means being surrounded by natural beauty, but for many it also demands hard work, precarity, fewer opportunities and – increasingly – being pushed out of the place your family might have called home for generations. In Rural, Rebecca Smith brings together the reasons we all love nature with the histories of life in its midst, and a prescient look at the dynamics for rural areas today. Why are our farmers struggling to make a profit on a pint of milk? What has Airbnb done to small communities in places like the Lake District? Whilst I’m sure we can all sympathise with people facing no-fault evictions, I don’t see that this is uniquely a rural issue. Does anyone have a right to continue to live in the area where they grew up if it is now beyong their means ? And should they ? If so, how much is the rest of society prepared to pay to subsidise this privilege ? I was pleased to read of a world I recognised, both the past of my ancestors and the precarious world of my farming friends who are forever multi-tasking and coming up with creative ways to turn a profit in a challenging economy. Whether you are interested in diving deeper into the everyday lives of your ancestors or are keen to understand more about the rural economy and the importance of caring for the countryside in all our lives, this book is warmly recommended.

Rural shows that this attitude has only consolidated over subsequent years. Smith suspects her upbringing confers a kind of “class ambiguity”. Descriptions of her childhood proximity to lakes, gardens and treehouses lead others to assume that her family was wealthy or well-connected. She has been blithely invited to shooting parties. In an episode of the recent documentary series Grayson Perry’s Full English, the only rural dweller and Cumbrian representative the artist sceptically interviews while questing for the “northern soul”, is Lord Inglewood of Hutton-in-the-Forest. Rural tenderly reveals the precarious lives that underpin the beauty and the wealth of our countryside. Essential reading for lovers of the land and its people" Rebecca grew up in tied cottages on country estates — homes that come with a job, where you are tied, body, soul and salary, to your landlord. Her father was a forester and one of their homes, on the Graythwaite Estate in Cumbria, was a single-storey lodge with a turret. It was rumoured to have had the first floor removed, like the top from a Victoria sponge, as it spoilt the view of a previous incumbent of The Big House. At the centre of the book is something core to Smith’s own experience: as rural villages transform into playgrounds for the rich and second homes proliferate, those who for generations have shaped – and been shaped by – the countryside are priced out. What is it is like, then, to belong to the countryside but be forced out and unable to return? Melding the voices of past and present through interviews, her own travels, and lives captured in historical archived documents, Smith explores the precarity of working-class rural life, from the Highland Clearances to the building and deconstruction of industrial settlements, the coronavirus pandemic and the rise of Airbnb. The story presented is honest and at times hopeful rather than bleak, and she does not romanticise working-class histories. Rather, Smith centres the deep connections and roots to the land felt by rural communities through the perspectives of those who have created it, her rich, astute descriptions bringing landscapes and histories to life.It’s a familiar and all-pervading precarity. I grew up in Fire Brigade houses when accommodation was still provided for rural key workers. I’ve lived in tied or tenanted cottages ever since; my husband variously a gardener, groom and ‘stallion man’ (always a conversation starter, that one.) A change of career meant the leap to rent an affordable ex-tied cottage. I can see our Big House from my bedroom window. As each village in an area of outstanding natural beauty is converted into a cluster of beautifully renovated cottages for affluent retired folk and weekenders, the families with children and noisy teenagers will disappear leaving a peaceful luxurious oasis for the wealthy.

Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex The publisher’s blurb describes this as “ a book for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain.” Many of us love the countryside but with 82.9% of England’s population, 83% of Scotland and around 80% of Wales (2019) living in urban areas, Britons may seem more detached than ever from rural life. Those of us with UK ancestors are likely to have at least some forebears living in the countryside in the first half of the 19th century, if not later. And with debates about fuel and food dominating recent headlines, awareness of our rural economies, communities and environment urgently needs to improve. Take a Look at Our Summary of November Highlights, Whether You're Looking for the Latest Releases or Gift Inspiration A thoughtful, moving, honest book that questions what it means to belong to a place when it can never belong to you ... Timely and illuminating'Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land, but often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there.

Dystopian Fiction Books Everyone Should Read: Explore The Darker Side of Possible Worlds and Alternative Futures And yet again, to write about housing with no reference to economics or supply and demand is fundamentally ignorant and can only lead to “solutions” that do not work:Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land, but often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there. Starting with Rebecca Smith's own family history - foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal - Rural is an exploration of our green and pleasant land, and the people whose labour has shaped it. The city won and Thirlmere Reservoir was built. But the controversy, Rebecca Smith writes in Rural, was ‘the first example of people mobilising against the threat of industrialisation to the natural world’. More than that, it illuminates the questions at the centre of her book, a thoughtful new study of working-class rural life. Who is the countryside for? What do we mean when we talk about ownership of land? Who gets to decide what is best for the land and those whose livings are tied up in it? For whose benefit is the landscape worked?